Sony's new Peter Parker gets earnest with Hall H crowd

Moments before Sony presented its reboot of the webslinger franchise, Garfield donned a cheaply made Spidey suit and pretended to be an anxious fan who commandeered a microphone to espouse the virtues of his favorite superhero.

Then he yanked off the mask and told the Hall H crowd how he really felt.

“Spider-Man saved my life,” the skinny Brit thesp said — without irony — before launching into a breathless, earnest, hyperbolic speech about how much the character meant to him growing up (and yes, he brought handwritten notes).

Later, when joined on the podium by director Marc Webb, co-star Emma Stone and others, he took another opportunity to convince the Comic-Con faithful of how deeply connected he is to the character he plays.

“Peter Parker’s always been the one fictional character — and Holden Caulfield — that I related to when I was growing up,” he said. “Across the board and every generation of comics, it’s always something I’ve felt close to, personally.”

Sony showed the trailer that leaked online last week (this one was in 3D, and with a little better sound), then treated Hall H to a couple of extended clips. One showed Martin Sheen dispensing avuncular duties at Parker’s high school; another was a cutesy meet-and-greet between Parker and Gwen Stacy (Stone).

But the most illuminating details for Spidey fans included scenes of Parker building and testing his mechanical webslingers (the Sam Raimi films went with an organic approach), and an introduction to villain the Lizard, a herpetologist who, in an attempt to regrow his missing limb, turns himself into a hulking reptile whose first order of business is to burst forth from a toilet and menace a couple of young co-eds with his new tongue.